Archive for the ‘Databases’ Category

There’s always been somewhat of a disconnect between designer-types and backend-types. And we’re not just talking about hairstyles, eyewear, and the contents of their bookshelves — designers and programmers approach problems in different ways, and their individual plans of attack don’t always jibe. Of course, you want your site to be sleek, fast, and bleeding-edge, but are you willing to compromise stability, scalability, and compatibility just so the users can ooh and aah at a few pretty pictures? Web design has always been a balancing act, and the ideologies of each camp often clash.

But Webmonkey’s here to say that it doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to create a site that has a lightweight Flash frontend, a dreamy interface, and a scalable, secure, and dynamic backend.

Webmonkey Scott has found the balance between eye-catching design and backend database wizardry. Lucky for us, he’s agreed to share this knowledge in a two-day tutorial. He’s even put together a hands-on project that shows you how to build an easy-to-update blog using Flash. That’s right, a Flash-based blog — it sounds a little loony, but this blog pulls content from a MySQL database and feeds it into the dynamic Flash frontend using a few lines of PHP code.

In day one, Scott talks you through the construction of an open source MySQL database using both the phpMyAdmin tool and mysql on the command line. You’ll learn how to add blog entries to the database and then you’ll learn how to run queries in PHP. Topics such as basic database organization and the behavior of variables are also covered in this lesson.

Day two shows you how to design and build the blog’s Flash frontend. You’ll use common Flash ActionScript objects to pull the content from your MySQL database to the different areas of your blog’s user interface. You’ll also learn some common workarounds to keep all of your content flowing smoothly.

Whether you are designer or a programmer, it’s time to roll up those sleeves and get ready to see how the other half lives. Even if those of you who don’t feel a particular loyalty to either side of the fence will still discover that there’s plenty of hands-on knowledge to be gained.

We’re not promising that designers will sell their $500 pencil sharpeners, start marrying UNIX geeks, and honeymooning in Cancun before breeding programmer/designer children, but we will insist that they sit in a room alone together until they can build a useful website that everyone can agree on. Hey, stranger things have happened. Like Carrot Top.

In Build a Website With Flash and MySQL – Lesson 1, we successfully created a MySQL database, filled it with blog entries, and learned how to query it. Now we’re going to move on to the fun stuff:creating a Flash container to display our blog entries as we pull them out of the database. I’m going to help you build something along the lines of what you’ll encounter at my own Flash blog site, Luxagraf.

Fire up Flash and create a new document. The first thing we need is a nice big text field to display our entries. You could create a text field in ActionScript if you like, using the createTextField() method. I don’t know about you, but my stomach for code is still full from yesterday, so I’ve just drawn a text field using the cursor tool and given it an instance name of entries_txt. In the Properties Inspector, set the text to be dynamic, multi-line, and HTML formatted. For safety’s sake, select the character option and click “embed all characters.” Flash has some issues with dynamic textfields that don’t have embedded characters, especially if you put your text under a mask. Continue Reading “Build a Website With Flash and MySQL – Lesson 2″ »

In this lesson, we’re going to dive right in and create some simple yet useful pages using PHP and MySQL. Let’s start by displaying the database we created yesterday in Lesson 1, but with a little more panache.

Welcome to the third and final lesson for this tutorial. If you’ve gone through Lesson 1 and Lesson 2, you already know the essentials for installing and writing useful scripts with MySQL and PHP. We’re going to look at some useful PHP functions that should make your life a lot easier. First, let’s look at include files.

We all know the basics of includes, right? Contents of an external file are referenced and imported into the main file. It’s pretty easy:You call a file and it’s included. When we do this in PHP there are two functions we need to talk about:include() and require(). The difference between these two functions is subtle but important, so let’s take a closer look. The require() function works in a XSSI-like way; files are included as part of the original document as soon as that file is parsed, regardless of its location in the script. So if you decide to place a require() function inside a conditional loop, the external file will be included even if that part of the conditional loop is false.

In my last article, Building With Ajax and Rails I made a faintly disparaging joke about some new web frameworks that have been created in fond imitation of Rails. I got a lot of feedback about that joke. I’m not allowed to comment here about the pending lawsuits, but I would ask that the drive-by eggings of my house and threats to my family please cease. (They’ve been relocated to a secret Webmonkey farm anyway.)

Today we’re going to take a look at a couple of those frameworks for PHP:Trax and Cake. Both attempt to bring the quick, easy, helpful tools and easily understood, easily maintained structure of Rails to PHP — a boon to web developers who know PHP and perhaps have some keeper code in that language, but can’t resist the Rails buzz. Both Trax and Cake use the same model-view-controller pattern and Active Record ways of addressing data that Rails does. Makes one curious, no? I don’t have time to get deeply into them today, but both stress “rapid development,” so let’s see if I, your average not-too-bright web developer, can get a little app off the ground before the end of this article.